Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Work Rants I am sitting here at work waiting for someone in our storage group to give me the "All Clear" on setting up our 4-node NetWare cluster for backups on the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup system here.  I know these things must be hard, but how hard can it be to enter 6 hostnames into a system and generate a password for their use?!?!  I know it might be hard, but last time I checked I can do all that and chew Big League Chew at the same time.  I'm doing that right now, while blogging, checking some email, and taking care of some other mundane administrative tasks.  Looks like this will not be done until tomorrow, at the earliest.  I had a meeting that lasted just over two hours today.  It was our bi-weekly managers meeting, but the second hour was consumed by someone describing a couple of projects that we are working on, both centered around the recruitment of potential students at the University.  The problem with this project is it was forced down by the Provost's Office, and there was very little consultation done with those of us in OIT.  Consequently, problems have arisen with system design and outside vendor involvement: each of the products procured for this project require unique webservers, and those webservers should preferably run on Windows server running Internet Information Services (IIS); redundancy--a key component of any production service for OIT--is not a large concern here; the outside vendor is only responsible for initial installation and configuration of the product, and they will do no work staging the installation within a development environment before deploying it into production The greater problem I have is that in cases such as this--where another campus agency is managing the project but approaching us to do the technical work--some type of contract or service-level agreement needs to be the byproduct.  Before then, however, a policy needs to be put in place to make sure that in any project that has far-reaching technical implications the appropriate stake-holders are leveraged.  In other words, before a vendor is procured, a project plan noting what components will need to interplay on said project needs to be done.  I realize that something like this may make a project somewhat bloated .  Nonetheless, it prevents snafus such as what we are observing from happening in the future.  Furthermore, getting the application and/or service one desires from the start is much more likely.  <Stepping down from my professional soapbox, hoping to get something done along these lines for future projects.> 3:42:29 PM    comment []  trackback []

More Traffic Ranting... Today's news had reports of how bad traffic is in the Baltimore-Washington area, with Baltimore ranked 17th in the nation in traffic congestion and Washington ranked 3rd.  You can expect to spend between 50 and 69 hours annually waiting in traffic if you live around both of these areas.  As though I needed some institute in Texas to tell me how bad traffic is around here.  I left earlier than I have been lately this morning, and I still had to bail out at Rt. 198 off of I-95 South.  For some reason, my fellow boobs on the road decided that we would just ride the brakes all the way to the Capital Beltway.  The best part is listening to the proposed solutions.  As far as I am concerned, mass transit is just not a real proposal.  We do not need a widened light-rail, bus, or train system.  We need more efficient schedules for these systems, then consider widening their focus.  For one, I hate having my schedule dictated by the train or bus schedule.  As a result, my desire to use mass transit just is not there.  10:01:00 AM    comment []  trackback []